Engine static lib

[Josh]

Do you want .a or .o or .lib?

[kennar]

Do you want .a or .o or .lib?

 

*.a ... I tend to use MingW.

 

Edit: Or does MingW also link with .lib

[Rick]

.lib for sure

[Mumbles]

.lib for me

 

Is there not a poll to go with this post?

[franck22000]

.lib for me too

[Pixel Perfect]

.lib for me too please

[Masterxilo]

Can't you make all of them for the different compilers or whatever?

[Canardia]

Actually you shouldn't expose .o, .a or .lib to the user at all. Let everyone use .dll only (and .so on Linux, and .DyLib on Mac of course), then it's cross-language compatible, and of course also cross-compiler and cross-platform compatible.

 

Don't make the same mistake as you did with bmx, when you gave them a mod file; they should have used a .dll also. That would have saved you lots of time which you spent on fixing missing things and differences in the dll and mod.

[Pixel Perfect]

But then you can't have a static build! Would be nice to have the choice to statically or dynamically link if it's not going to cause Josh too many problems maintaining it.

[Canardia]

Static builds are useless, they only need additional resources from the OS to handle the huge exe file size. Besides, then you can't update your game with the real changes, but always need to download a 4GB (or slightly smaller) exe.

[Masterxilo]

Who puts all the media in the exe file?

[Rick]

A 4GB exe with just code would be an amazing amount of code

[Canardia]

Well if you really are about making static exes, then you need to include all the Windows DLLs too! Why make an exception?

How often have we seen that a user doesn't have the glut dlls, openal dlls, correct version of some directx dlls, etc....

And since youre making a static exe, you need also all possible hardware dlls there, unless you want to maintain 1000 different static exes.

[Pixel Perfect]

This is the natural inflation in Lumoojaworld Joking aside, it's nice to have the choice, by the time lots of other third party code has been included you can end up with a lot of DLLs.

[Mumbles]

How often have we seen that a user doesn't have the glut dlls, openal dlls, correct version of some directx dlls, etc....

 

To me, this sounds like a reason to not link dynamically

[Flexman]

What was that Barry Schwartz video about?..too many choices? Way to derail a simple question.

.lib is fine but whatever you like. I'm used to .lib (everything else I link is).

[flachdrache]

.lib would be great i assume -

however, that bears another question (iam self learning e.g. not in school) - who would suggest bloodshed using Mingw/GCC 3.4.2 over Ms-EE version(s)? And - is there any differance at all, in terms of which (windows) dlls will be included ?

Iirc missing dx dll`s are allways debug builds from the SDK (which would need to be provided) and missing windows dll`s are from the windows SDK (if one is using those) ?! Sorry if i miss the point.

[L B]

.lib

 

And @Lumooja: Static linking the Leadwerks library would mean restricting access to pirates. I see no negative aspect into that, especially if you only statically link code and not media files.

[Roland]

As I'm using C++ a static lib would be fine. Specially as

you will not have to bother about using memory over a DLL boundary.

 

But the downside would be that the C# users would suffer

as the import to C# wrappers must go through a DLL.

[Josh]

.lib wins.

 

The DLL with C interface is a separate matter.

[Roland]

.lib wins.

 

The DLL with C interface is a separate matter.

 

Thats nice. And thinking of it, if someone needs to have it as a DLL (C# users)

it can be solved by creating a own DLL containing the lib.

[Josh]

I'm a bit confused because it seems GCC .lib files are not the same as MS .lib files. Am I to understand there is no standard static library format for C++?

 

Can the MS compiler load .a or .o files?

[Mumbles]

Can the MS compiler load .a or .o files?

 

Rather depends if you can make Visual Studio create executables for other platforms... I've not seen a way to do that yet (But watch it be just one small option in the project properties )

 

If that can't be done, I don't see they would include the ability to read any static lib file format other than their own.

 

Really the question would be "Which compiler would you be most likely to use."

[Scott Richmond]

What is the actual advantage to doing this? I don't fully understand the difference but it sounds like a lot of work to simply avoid having a small amount of DLLs in the root directory of the game.

[Canardia]

You don't even need now any other files than game.exe in the root directory of the game. I have a structure like this in my game. Game.exe can use chdir() to set data as current directory, and then launch ..\bin\core.exe with WinExec():

game.exe
|---bin/
|   |---core.exe
|   |---engine.dll
|   |---newton.dll
|
|---data/
   |---shaders.pak
   |---scripts/
   |---terrain/
   |---maps/
   |---vegetation/